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Only six months later, Ceti Alpha VI exploded, shifting Ceti Alpha V's orbit and turning it into a desert-like world, dominated by craylon gas and high-velocity winds. The planet thus became inimical to life, with the only remaining known indigenous species being the Ceti eel.

In the script of "Twilight", the surface view of Ceti Alpha V was described thus; "Dozens of makeshift human dwellings are clustered in this small valley. We’re on a harsh but habitable Class-M world... only a few occasional patches of vegetation are visible here and there." The writers have joked on the audio commentary for "Twilight" that, if it wasn't bad enough the Xindi killed off almost all of Humanity, a hundred years from "Twilight", Ceti Alpha V would have been destroyed as well.

The spin-off novelTo Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh explicitly addressed the above issue. Spock postulated that Ceti Alpha VI's destruction and the environmental impacts on Ceti Alpha V had another, shared cause (possibly a small black hole passing through the system), while apparently the miscounting resulted from the Reliant's crew counting inward, finding the outermost planet (and mistaking the remains of Ceti Alpha VI for part of an outer asteroid belt).

In Vonda N. McIntyre's novelization of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there was some dialog between the Reliant's bridge crew speculating about the cause of the discrepancy between the planet count of the system reported by an old interstellar probe (20) and the current count (19) – one possible conclusion they drew was that the limitations of the probe's imaging systems had led to inaccurate data being reported. This dialog occurred shortly before Terrell and Chekov decided to beam down to the planet.